Page 43 of Go Alone

He got to his feet and saw a small cabin a quarter mile distant. A figure stood in front of the cabin, looking at him with concern. A woman, small and elderly.

Cox smiled and thanked God.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“I think our killer’s homeless,” Kate opined.

Marcus looked up from his computer. They had returned to their hotel after finishing at the Brannigan scene. Anita was working with Columbus, Bexley, and Gahanna PDs, overseeing a search for their suspect.

Marcus was digging into Raymond Brannigan’s past, personal and professional, to try to figure out what motivation their killer might have had and possibly extract a lead from that. So far, he had come up empty. As expected, the firm and its founder were well aware of the danger of provenance and had obfuscated all records related to the adverse possession claim, leaving behind only vague statements about their claims being “affirmed” and “actions” taken to remove the “trespassers”.

“That makes sense,” Marcus said. “You think this is a revenge thing?”

Kate sighed and paced their hotel room, a coffee cup rapidly cooling in her hand. “I don’t know. It could be, but it still doesn’t seem right.”

“What doesn’t seem right about it? The symbolism’s all there. He’s killing people who stole other people’s homes. He’s filling their mouths with potting soil and staging their bodies in their neighbors’ homes, or in Brannigan’s case the location of the homes he stole. You’re better at figuring meaning out from symbols than I am, but from where I’m sitting, the message is, ‘You stole this land, and that’s exactly why you’re dying.’ He’s literally making them choke on their sins.”

Kate nodded. “That’s all true,” she agreed. “But I still don’t see the personal connection.”

“Does there have to be? People get arrested every year for violently protesting unfair treatment of other people. This killer could see it as his duty to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves. That even fits with the idea of this being a mission from God.”

Kate sipped her coffee. It wasn’t cold yet, but it was getting impatient.

“Yeah,” she said. “You could be right. Maybe that’s why it’s more grief than anger. This isn’t personal to him, it’s just his duty, one he doesn’t take pleasure from.”

A spark flared in her mind. She tilted her head. “Marcus, can you find out if any housing advocacy groups represented the squatters Brannigan kicked out of the tower properties?”

“Yeah, I’m working on it,” Marcus replied. “I’m digging through court records to try to figure out what Brannigan’s records aren’t telling us. You have an idea?”

“I think you might be right, actually.”

Marcus lifted an eyebrow. “I love how surprised you sound.”

She rolled her eyes. “Ha ha. But really, that’s what advocacy groups do. They speak for people who can’t speak for themselves. So maybe this killer is picking up where they left off.”

“Huh.” Marcus’s eyes lit up as the wheels in his own head began to turn. “Maybe it’s someone who worked for one of these advocacy groups.”

“Or both,” Kate said. “Or all three if you find a different one for the Brannigan case.”

Marcus nodded and leaned closer to his laptop, focus renewed. “I’ll see if I can narrow the search a little. I got some names for the plaintiffs, so maybe I can cross-reference that with records from advocacy groups operating at the same time. Give me a little while to look through this, and I’ll let you know when I have something.”

Kate left him to work, but she stayed in the room. She had her own thread she wanted to pull.

The land covenant Gabe discovered might be obscure to academia and the general public but maybe not to people passionate about housing advocacy. In the same way, colonial maritime law was familiar to sovereign citizens, while the general public would neither know nor care about it.

And just like sovereign citizens justified acting outside of the law with their own obscure documents, maybe this killer was justifying his murder not just with the Bible but with an old turn-of-the-century land covenant between like-minded individuals trying to ensure fair and equal protections for property.

The document’s official name was the “Agreement for Fair and Equitable Treatment of Real Property Owners of the State of Ohio”. Kate plugged it into a search document and got a link to several housing advocacy groups, registered agents, and an Ohio Attorney General’s Office web page that listed plain text summaries of property laws.

She started with the advocacy groups. Most of them were only a few years old and none of them were old enough to encompass the last Howard Greer case from four years ago. She opened a few that were old enough to have been around when the Garfields’ home was foreclosed but got nothing promising.

It seemed that the key to surviving for these groups was to shift focus from legal action to community service. Several of the websites showed people offering free home repair services, volunteering at shelters and soup kitchens, and organizing toy and clothing drives. All noble actions, but Kate wasn’t looking for noble behavior right now.

She leaned back in her chair and chewed on her lip. It was like the answers were buried in the center that they just couldn’t reach. Marcus was trying to dig it out from the bottom, and Kate was shoveling away at the top, but the answer was somewhere in between.

“Okay,” Marcus said. “I think I might have something.”

Kate turned to him. “Yeah?”